


the past is just a bridge we burned down behind us

by raumdeuter



Series: team spirit [2]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rivers of London Fusion, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 19:52:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7120135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raumdeuter/pseuds/raumdeuter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steven Gerrard is Liverpool. Xabi knows that better than most.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the past is just a bridge we burned down behind us

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Lightning Tent" by Wildlife, which is one of the most Xabi songs I've ever heard, ever.
> 
> This is a not-quite-sequel to _genius pediludii_ , which may be helpful to read first.

_i. anoeta_

“Wait,” says Mikel, and Xabi pauses obligingly, coming to a halt with his foot balanced lightly on the ball. “Do that again.”

So he does—a long dribbling run down center field, a short lob to Mikel, who takes up the ball and passes briskly to the next kid, who sweeps it along in a smooth arc down the pitch, and it happens again, nothing flashy, nothing dramatic, just a calm certain knowledge of where the ball will go, long before it happens. Xabi catches the ball easily on his chest, and the pitch changes in front of him.

It’s like he’s staring at a tactical map, a hundred different possibilities radiating out in front of him, impossible to read them all. He sees a kid coming up on his right with a faint white line pointing straight at Mikel, who has a faint white line pointing straight back at Xabi, and he passes, one-two-three, picks it up again, and shoots—

The ball hits the crossbar, bouncing uselessly away, and Mikel groans.

“Doesn’t always work,” he says, and Xabi smiles with all the confidence of youth.

“It will,” he says.

\---

They say magic runs deep in the Alonso blood, the same way football does—not that magic is something you’re born with, of course, any more than you’re born with the ability to fire a ball into a goal from deep in your own half. Some people just take naturally to one or the other, unless you’re an Alonso, in which case you take naturally to both. Xabi’s grandfather could see the end of a match before the kickoff; and Xabi’s father can weave a spell on the pitch, each pass a _forma_ ; and someday, he says, Xabi will be able to do the same. It isn’t cheating, not really, it’s just thinking one step ahead.

It isn’t enough.

\---

His father finds him sitting alone in the dressing room after his first match as team captain, a towel over his shoulders, his back to the cool metal of the locker. He knows he should feel elated, honored, ecstatic—something, anything other than vague disappointment, a strange hollow in the pit of his stomach. It hadn’t been a terrible match, but—

(But when his father had played for Real Sociedad something in him had _changed_. It always spurred a man on, playing at home, but when the crowd cheered for his father it was like he’d grown wings on his feet, like he was the sun—)

“I thought it would feel different,” says Xabi. “I thought…”

“You thought maybe the heavens would part and the spirit of La Real would fill you up, and you would lead the team to victory?” says his father. “It doesn’t work like that. The armband doesn’t make you a god.”

“It made you one,” says Xabi, before he can stop himself.

His father laughs, a little sadly, Xabi thinks. He says, “You have to give yourself to the team before the team will give itself to you.”

 

_ii. anfield_

“So I left,” says Xabi, “and I came here instead.”

Stevie huffs out a laugh. He looks at Xabi with a wry fondness in his eyes and says, “Should I be worried, then?”

Xabi blinks at him, baffled. “Worried about what?”

“You,” says Stevie, the remnants of his laugh still curling the corners of his mouth. “Coming to take me job.”

Xabi doesn’t think he could, even if he wanted to. He doesn’t think anyone could. Stevie has this way of pulling people into his orbit with nothing more than a quiet word and a smile, until suddenly they find themselves with Anfield singing in their blood the way it does in his. Xabi has been here just over a year and already his passes are cleaner, his steps lighter, the way they never were in San Sebastián. He knows perfectly well it isn’t his own magic at work, but he treasures it anyway.

“You are new to the job, anyway,” says Xabi, just to be contrary, “they will maybe not even notice you are gone,” and Stevie laughs again and cuffs him on the back of the head, and Xabi pushes him back, and soon enough they’re mock brawling on the sofa, and the conversation is forgotten entirely.

This is the thing. The fans say Steven Gerrard is Liverpool and Xabi knows that better than most, but he hadn’t been Liverpool when they’d first met. 

He hadn’t been Liverpool in Istanbul, either, even though in Istanbul he had played like a god among men, even though in Istanbul Xabi had stepped up to the penalty spot and _known_ like he’d never known a thing before, even though in Istanbul he had kissed Xabi and Xabi had thought he could taste magic in the kiss, pressing into his mouth, soft and steady and deep. He’d never really thought about what Liverpool might taste like, because who does, but if Liverpool had a taste it would have tasted like that—like fresh-cut grass, like smoke, like the sea, like having a wall at his back, ancient and solid. It would have tasted like playing beside Stevie feels, like drawing from an endless well and finding the bucket brimming with clear water, every time.

Xabi knows how it happens, now. His father was right. Stevie hadn’t been Liverpool until the call from Chelsea, until the call to Marshall. He hadn’t been Liverpool until he’d turned his back on Stamford Bridge for good.

Now Liverpool sits on Stevie’s shoulders like a heavy mantle and he’s—different, somehow. Playing beside him is different. Xabi can’t read him the way he can read everyone else on the team, and when he passes to Stevie he can’t see the possibilities he did before.

Stevie says he’s sure it was the right choice. Xabi doesn’t say anything.

Not for the first time he wishes this gift of the Alonsos worked off the pitch, too. What he wouldn’t give to look at Stevie and see a soft white line radiating gently into the future, to medals and trophies and league titles, and know he’s meant to follow.

 _Or even the opposite,_ whispers that ever-present voice in his mind. _It’d be easier to go, wouldn’t it, if you knew you were abandoning a sinking ship?_

But when Xabi leaves Liverpool it isn’t because he can see the end of things. It’s because he can’t.

 

_iii. bernabéu_

“It’s one thing to be a manager’s yes-man,” says Iker. “I don’t have to like it, but it happens. I can accept it.”

Xabi says nothing, watches him keenly. He doesn’t need the gift to know where this conversation is going, but he doesn’t interrupt Iker, only settles back in his chair and steeples his fingers. There’s a certain value in waiting even when you can see the end result. Sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised.

“What I don’t understand,” says Iker, “is how you can choose to stand behind Mourinho knowing exactly the kind of man he is.”

He doesn’t say: _and knowing what I am,_ because Iker is, in many respects, a man who believes in following the old traditions, one of them being that speaking a thing aloud reduces its power, but Xabi hears it nonetheless.

He hears it all the louder because he, too, has grown up with the old traditions. In Spain it isn’t the same as it is in England; there’s none of the manufactured silence, the so-called arrangements between worlds. In some families it’s almost a religion; you’re raised to the life, sent into the youth team early, with the expectation that you don’t complain when you aren’t chosen. Iker couldn’t have known for certain that it would be him, and yet when it was he must have accepted the mantle without surprise. 

When Iker presses his lips to cold marble in the Plaza de Cibeles he is as much a priest as he is a god, and no less powerful for being both; and it fills Xabi with a jealousy he never felt when he looked at Stevie.

“You don’t think there’s value in the kind of man he is?” says Xabi at last, and Iker has the good grace to look surprised.

“What value?” he says. “He doesn’t give a damn about the rivalries, the alliances--all the things that have made us who we are. He spits in our eyes and calls it respect.”

He isn’t speaking for Madrid anymore, at least not exclusively. Xabi knows he and Xavi discuss more than press conferences when they call each other up. There’s old magic at play here, older than football, maybe even older than Spain. It didn’t fade into the aether when the modern era arrived; if anything it just found a new home.

This is the thing: Xabi doesn’t know, exactly, if Mourinho is a practitioner. If his outbursts at the press, at his own players, mask something else--if the bitterness that laces his words is his own _signare_ , twisted into every sentence to form a battering ram against the ancient pacts--or if he’s all bluster, just an angry man with nothing beneath the surface. Xabi has no doubt that Mourinho is talented enough to be a practitioner, if he applied himself: perhaps not with the refined grace that comes with the Alonso blood, but with the barely-leashed volatility of the self-taught. He suspects it doesn’t really matter. There are things that can be learned from Mourinho, regardless of whether Mourinho himself realizes it.

Aloud he says, “A manager who can bend a team to his will like this--who can bend two teams--deserves at least a little acknowledgment. Don’t you think?”

The look Iker turns on him is more disappointed than anything else. “Managers come and go,” says Iker. He taps the crest above his heart. “This--this will outlast them all.”

His voice is flat. He’s not trying to persuade Xabi; maybe he thinks Xabi is beyond persuading. But Xabi thinks inexorably of Stevie, a heartbeat away from going to Mourinho and Chelsea all those years ago, and suddenly he finds he has to swallow the bile in his throat. 

A few summers later he watches _La Furia Roja_ crumble under its own weight and take all of them with it. But in Rio Bastian Schweinsteiger swears and fights and leaves his blood on the grass of the Maracanã, old magic if there ever was any--and Xabi comes to the only decision he has left to make.

It isn’t until he arrives in Munich that he realizes Schweinsteiger isn’t Bayern.

 

_iv. allianz_

“He didn’t tell me,” says Thomas. 

“Thomas—” says Philipp.

“He didn’t even text me,” says Thomas.

Manu this time: “Thomas—”

“Because apparently playing at being a WAG in England was more important than telling me he was going to drop everything and leave.”

Thomas Müller has this way of getting angry that reminds Xabi of nothing so much as a strangely articulate hawk—his gaze sharpens, his fists curl into talons, and he turns the concentrated force of his wit, biting even under normal circumstances, on the object of his ire.

Xabi didn’t think it’d ever be directed toward Bastian Schweinsteiger.

“You did not tell him,” says Xabi, twisting his mouth around the unfamiliar German, and at that all three of them stare at him, as if they’d forgotten he was there. Which they might have, now that he thinks about it: he’s uncomfortably aware that he’s an outsider here, a foreign practitioner from a foreign magical tradition.

“Bastian did not know what you are,” he says, carefully, more a question than a statement, and at Thomas’s wary nod continues: “You must have kept it from him for a reason.”

“I suppose it would have felt too much like emotional blackmail,” says Philipp. “He reacts badly to that.”

Xabi stares at him, but Philipp only returns his gaze, utterly unapologetic. It’s just like Philipp, really, to keep the truth from his own vice-captain so he can keep playing at his best, but it doesn’t mean Xabi can’t be impressed by the coldness of it.

“The way I see it he would’ve left anyway,” says Manu. “With or without your blessing.”

“I wouldn’t have tried to stop him,” snaps Thomas, which is a contender for the most bald-faced lie Xabi’s ever heard in his life. “He’s a functioning adult and I’ve got nothing against Van Gaal, it’s not like I would’ve tried to glamour him into staying.”

“He said he didn’t feel like he could talk about it,” says Philipp, but he winces as soon as he says it.

“He talked to you,” says Thomas, prodding Philipp with a bony finger. “He talked to Manu. He talked to Kalle. But he didn’t talk to me.”

None of them can say anything in response to that; Xabi expects none of them are supposed to, because after a moment Thomas starts up again.

“Maybe he knew who I was after all,” he says, “and he knew if I found out Mr. Knows-Where-All-The-Toilets-Are was planning to leave I’d kick his ass so hard he’d shit out his mouth. Maybe that’s why he didn’t tell me anything. Bastard didn’t even have the decency to give us a good show. _Manchester United was the only team that could’ve gotten me to leave, I am excited to take this new step in my career, something something corporate synergy something_ —”

Xabi says, “Do you know why I come to Bayern, Thomas?”

It’s the suddenness of the question that stops Thomas more than anything else. “Sure,” he says after a moment. “You said you wanted to learn from Guardiola.”

“That was a lie,” says Xabi.

To their credit, not one of them bats an eyelash. Xabi supposes he deserves that.

“I realize you are Bayern the moment I set eyes on you at training,” he says. Thomas snorts but, gratifyingly, doesn’t feel compelled to offer commentary. “But for the longest time before that, I thought it was Basti.”

Thomas and Manu frown, but Philipp slowly nods, as if confirming something to himself.

“He did know, I think,” says Xabi. “Even if he cannot put it into as many words. Even if he does not realize there is more to it than some kind of charisma. I think it was a relief to him, when he finally left. It is hard enough, people thinking you are a god. It is even harder when you know you aren’t one.”

“But you still renewed your contract,” says Thomas. He still doesn’t look happy, but the tightness has mostly faded from around his eyes. Thomas has never been the type to hold on to anger. “Even after you found out.”

Xabi shrugs. “Well, there is the chance to learn from Guardiola also. And I like seeing what you can do, after all.”

Thomas smiles at that--just a faint quirk of his lips, a flash of teeth.

“I guess I should be honored you decided to pay us a visit, then,” he says, and there’s an ironic note to his words that leaves Xabi a little unsettled.

But when he hears about Stevie, when he hears about Iker, he’s finally certain he made the right decision. All these years he’s been fixated on what it means to become a god, and he’s never thought about how it might feel to have that torn away.

You have to give yourself to the team before the team will give itself to you, his father had said, but he tells himself it’s too high a price to pay. He tells himself he dodged a bullet, leaving Real Sociedad when he did. He tells himself he won’t miss Munich, like he doesn’t miss Madrid, like he doesn’t miss Liverpool. 

He knows all too well how it will play out in the end. Xabi has pledged his faith to a god once already, before he asked for it back again. Some things you don’t need to experience twice.

 

_v. anfield, again_

So he’s not sure what he’s expecting when he steps out onto the pitch. It isn’t as if the dirt itself is magic, though he knows there’s magic _there_ , residual scraps of spells lingering years after the fact, faint like prayers. It’s part and parcel of the beautiful game, this absurd need to attach sentimentality to everything, even things that don’t need extra sentimentality, like farewell charity matches. It makes for a good story, after.

In the end he decides not to expect anything at all, and it’s true that when he emerges from the tunnel, it doesn’t feel any different at first. The grass is soft under his boots, and the smell is the same, sun and sweat and forty thousand bodies pressed together in close quarters.

But when the match kicks off and he finds the ball at his feet, and the world fades as it always does to a soft blur, the white lines and arrows of the familiar spell arcing across the grass--when the rising chorus swells around him, _walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain_ \--there is Stevie, running on ahead, and for a moment Xabi could swear that all the lines on the pitch are pointing straight at him, and into forever.


End file.
